Bite of Burnaby 2026
Bringing a city together through food: a month-long culinary festival with 75+ participating restaurants, led on social from strategy to final post.
- Client
- Tourism Burnaby
- My role
- Social Media Lead & Content Direction
- Timeline
- February – March 2026
- Platforms
- Instagram, Facebook, TikTok
- 2.28M+
- Social media impressions
- 251K+
- Festival website page views
- 75+
- Participating restaurants
- +73.6%
- Facebook engagements, year over year
January–March 2026 reporting period. Impressions combine Instagram, Facebook and TikTok; website traffic reflects the broader festival campaign.
At a glance
Challenge
Keep a month-long festival exciting while giving 75+ restaurants meaningful visibility.
Approach
A content-first strategy built around how people discover food: by neighbourhood, cuisine and event.
Result
2.28M+ impressions, 251K+ website page views, and Facebook engagement rate up from 1.6% to 3.9%.
01
The challenge
Bite of Burnaby is Tourism Burnaby’s flagship culinary festival. It isn’t a single weekend: it runs all of March, with restaurants, special menus, events and giveaways happening across the city at once.
The job wasn’t only to build awareness before launch, but to keep people exploring for the whole month. The content had to build festival-wide awareness, give individual restaurants real visibility, and sustain momentum without repetitive promotional posts, all while coordinating restaurants, organizers, photographers, videographers, creators and internal stakeholders.
02
The strategy
Rather than promoting restaurants one by one, I organized the festival’s social strategy around how audiences actually discover and experience food.
Neighbourhood discovery
Restaurant guides for Burnaby Heights, Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed, Edmonds and Burnaby Mountain.
Cuisine-led picks
Themed recommendations, from Japanese and Indian to plant-based and affordable eats.
Event storytelling
Videos, carousels and reminders for tastings, chef-led experiences and workshops.
Creator collaborations
Food creators and partners brought the festival to new audiences, with every piece reviewed for brand fit.
03
What I did
Strategy & planning
Set the content strategy, editorial priorities, themes and publishing schedule.
Creative production
Planned shoots and produced photography, short-form video, carousels and copy.
Restaurant coordination
Worked directly with restaurants, organizers and partners on content and messaging.
Creator management
Coordinated collaborations, reviewed deliverables and managed permissions.
Community management
Answered questions and kept conversation going across all three channels.
Performance optimization
Tracked reach, engagement and growth to steer publishing priorities.
04
Results
Festival social, 2025 vs 2026
| Metric | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Facebook engagements | 27,366 | 47,484 | +73.55% |
| Facebook engagement rate | 1.6% | 3.9% | +143.75% |
| Facebook follower growth | 67 | 104 | +55.22% |
| Instagram engagement rate | 0.5% | 0.6% | +20% |
Festival social channels, Feb 1 – Apr 4, 2026
Beyond reach, the content drove action: nearly 32K link clicks from Instagram and Facebook during the festival window.
- 1.2M
- Facebook views
- 403.8K
- Facebook viewers
- 26.6K
- Facebook link clicks
- 901.5K
- Instagram views
- 54.5K
- Instagram content interactions
- 5.3K
- Instagram link clicks
Results reflect the full festival marketing effort, including paid promotion and partners. My role centred on the festival’s social strategy, content direction, production and community engagement.
Featured content
@biteofburnaby on Instagram ↗
05 · Takeaway
The best culinary marketing doesn’t just show people where to eat. It gives them a reason to explore the stories, communities and cultures behind the food.